The FBI Is Trying to Make Up a New Kind of Black Terrorist

Despite a lack of evidence and a surge in white nationalist violence.

The mass shooting in Las Vegas reheated a long-fought public debate: what constitutes terrorism? And, specifically, when do we use that word to describe violence from white people? It's an important question to ask as far-right extremism rises in the US, but the FBI is busy looking for other monsters under its bed: "Black Identity Extremists."

In a memo obtained by Foreign Policy from early August, the FBI claims that the continued concern over "alleged" police abuse has fueled a rise in violence against police. And that rise in violence has produced a new kind of terrorist. It reads in part:

The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.

Basically, the more people know about police brutality (we can safely throw out the "alleged"), the bigger the risk to cops.

The main evidence for this seems to be the shooting of police officers in Dallas in 2016. But that designation, "Black Identity Extremist," is entirely new. Foreign Policy couldn't even find Google references to it outside of five documents, including ones for law enforcement training, that were only two months old—which is after the FBI memo was written.

Despite these efforts to create a new class of terrorist, there's no evidence that any such movement really exists. Critics of the label say it's an attempt to make an official false equivalence between Black Lives Matter activists and white supremacists, who are responsible for the majority of domestic terror attacks and politically-motivated police murders.

A former senior counterterrorism and intelligence official from the Department of Homeland Security who reviewed the document at FP’s request expressed shock at the language. “This is a new umbrella designation that has no basis,” the former official said. “There are civil rights and privacy issues all over this.”

Specifically, this would give the FBI wide freedom to boost surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists. Hell, it's so vague it could cover anyone who attends a protest or takes a "police shouldn't kill unarmed black people" stance publicly.

This isn't some paranoid concern: the FBI has a notorious history for spying on and smearing black activists. This is the agency behind the COITELPRO efforts to undermine civil rights groups, and the infamous attempt to blackmail Martin Luther King into suicide. So it's not out of character that their response to police brutality is to invent a pretense to criminalize critics, rather than actually deal with police brutality.